Real Anger?

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Transcript:

“Are you really that angry?”

One of my favorite comedians is Bill Burr.

Bill Burr has a bit on one of his early albums about smashing cupcakes at a flea market or someplace like that - and he ruminates about the panicked reactions of the people around him as they see him smashing cupcakes like a psycho.

Bill Burr more or less embodies repressed rage on stage.  Or at least, he did.  He’s mellowed some with age.

He’s still visibly irked and frustrated by much of life - but it’s more balanced out these days.

When I first started doing stand-up, I would talk about minutiae in life as if it were infinitely frustrating.

This was a very Seinfeldian thing to do.  It was a very Bill Burr thing to do.  I loved the tv show Seinfeld - Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David.  I loved Bill Burr’s stand-up.

But just because you love something another artist is doing doesn’t mean that that same vibe is an accurate expression of you.

You’re laughing at what they’re doing because there’s something in there that you’re connecting with.  But you’re only connecting with a part of them.  You’re only vibing on their frequency to an extent.  You don’t vibrate at the exact same frequency that they do.

Lots of artists start out by imitating their artistic idols - most likely poorly imitating.

I never copied the mannerisms of Seinfeld or Burr, but they did have a strong influence on my writing.  On my topic selection for jokes.

And my go-to emotions for most of the things I was writing about were frustration and anger.  And often they were exaggerated in ways that if I were being honest, I would have admitted, “Yea, I don’t really feel this strongly about this.  I’m not this angry.  I was never as upset as I’m pretending to be over this.”

Faking emotion in stand-up is death.

People will read it on you immediately.

You can’t accurately manufacture feelings around a topic if you don’t actually have some of those feelings in some kind of way.

Now, that doesn’t mean that what you express on stage is EXACTLY how you feel.  Art leaves wiggle room.  That’s one of my favorite parts about it.

But, if you’re not expressing something authentic and real and true to yourself on some level, people are gonna sniff that out immediately.

Have you ever gotten in front of a room of 200 plus people under a spotlight and tried to behave inauthentically?  What are the chances you’re going to fool all of those people?  Even if you managed to; why would you want to?  What are you gaining from tricking those people into believing in this fake version of you?  Trust me, it’s not satisfying.

To me, the whole point of the medium of stand-up comedy is to relate authentically to the audience; usually, in regard to topics that are tricky, challenging, or perhaps even taboo in some ways.  You’re trying to express things authentically that aren’t easily expressed in everyday life.

The best stand-up doesn’t come from the same place as polite discussions at dinner parties.  It just doesn’t.  Stand-up, even squeaky clean stand-up, is a little more impish and irreverent.  It’s not state-sanctioned, party-line discourse.

So to do stand-up is to express yourself authentically about topics that make most people at least slightly uneasy.  That’s frightening.  But if you’re going to succeed, you have to engage in that project authentically.

To be authentic is to have integrity.

What does integrity mean?  It means you are integrated.  Integrity.  Integrated.

What you are saying and doing is well integrated into who you are.  Everything lines up top to bottom, bottom to top, so that how you are presenting yourself makes integrated sense.

Your internal thought processes are well integrated.  Your external expression of those thoughts and your interaction with the external world - with the audience - all of that is integrated in an authentic way that makes sense.

When things are flowing out of you to the audience and back and it all makes sense and everyone is laughing - that’s like having a bunch of spinning plates up in the air on those spinning plate sticks.  You can’t fake it.  At least not for long.  It’s too fragile, too delicate.  There are so many little micro muscles that are active in such specific ways to get that level of balance.  It’s not a trick - it’s a practiced skill that becomes part of who you are.  You don’t think about riding a bike; you just ride the bike.

Integrity comes from consistent daily practice.  We are what we do.  Your daily habits and actions make up your personality.  You can’t be one person in real life and then be a completely different person when you’re performing without a bunch of extra strain and effort.

Sure, you can do a character on stage.  Larry the Cable Guy isn’t the same as Dan Whitney - but Dan Whitney is honest about the fact that Larry the Cable Guy is a character.  He hasn’t tried to scrub his Wikipedia page so that the audience isn’t aware that it’s an act.

But at that point, you are an actor.  You’re playing a role that you have written for yourself.  You’re telling the audience that this is a different personality being expressed on stage.  It’s not your personality and they know that.

That’s not the type of stand-up comedy I strive for.  I want to be myself on stage as much as possible.  That’s my goal with stand-up.  I see it as a medium for authentic self-expression.

With acting, you’re trying to become someone else.  With stand-up, I want to explore my own mind more thoroughly - and that sounds horribly self-absorbed, but it’s not completely narcissistic because that exploration happens in concert with an audience.  You’re exploring your mind by bouncing thoughts off a big group of people in front of you.  You figure yourself out more and more through their reactions to you.

One of Bill Burr’s close friends, another of my favorite comics, I’ve mentioned him before - Patrice O’Neal.  There’s an excellent documentary about Patrice called Killing is Easy.  In that documentary, Patrice says, “I don’t see myself as an entertainer.  A juggler is an entertainer.  A magician is an entertainer.  I don’t think a good comedian entertains anybody.”

For Patrice, comedy was all about telling the truth.  You don’t sacrifice your honest feelings for the sake of entertainment.  You don’t fake it for a laugh.  And Patrice shared his perspective as authentically as any comedian ever has.  The laughs - and they were big, deep laughs - the laughs were the result of him telling his subjective truth authentically.

That doesn’t mean that everything Patrice was saying on stage was objectively capital “T” true.  But it was an authentic expression of his real lived experience in our culture.  He didn’t lie about how he felt.  He truthfully expressed his emotions about the subjects he addressed.

Subjective truth means our individual truth - what we know or believe to be true.  Objective truth means what is true regardless of our opinions and feelings.  Stand-up is about the expression of subjective truth.  It’s not science or math.

Dennis Leary quotes Patrice at the end of the documentary: “I ain’t up there telling jokes.  Fuck jokes.  I’m up there explaining how I fuckin’ feel, and a lotta times how I feel is fucking complicated.”

That’s what’s so cool about stand-up.  You don’t have to be perfect.  You don’t have to know everything.  You aren’t up there lecturing and explaining it all to the audience.  You’re saying shit into a microphone and then you’re watching to see how all the people staring at you react to you.  It’s a conversation about confusing shit.

And to have a real conversation with the audience you have to be the real you.  You have to say the things you really think and feel.  At least on some level.  Maybe you’re unsure of how you feel - then you have to express yourself in that way - be unsure.

If you’re mad, be mad.  Not fake mad.  If you’re sad, be sad.  If you’re happy, be happy.  You might be mad, sad, and happy about all the wrong things - who cares?  That’s probably funny.  Talk about it.  People will be interested.

Don’t try to predict what people are going to be interested in and find funny.  Talk about what you’re interested in and care about in an authentic way.  That’s where all the biggest laughs are hidden.  It’s also where you’re going to create original art.  People can’t copy your unique feelings.

The hardest part about doing stand-up this way is that you’re putting yourself out there to be criticized.

There’s a famous neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, who’s done a lot of work on how emotions influence human decision-making.  His work on how the human brain functions has shown why the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution haven’t led us down the road to utopia.  Basically, human beings are emotional animals and we don’t behave perfectly logically and rationally.

Even the super dweeby nerdy philosophical scientist type people - they all are swayed in their behavior primarily by subconscious desires and emotions they have minimal control over.

This has to do with how our brains evolved.

I promise this is still related to stand-up.

Damasio’s work is fascinating, but this isn’t the place for me to go further into it.  The reason I bring him up is I was listening to a podcast interview in which he was talking about why having feelings is so vulnerable.

It’s scary to share our feelings with other people.  Why is that?  Why do we care?  I care because I do stand-up comedy and it’s critical for me to conquer my fear of sharing my feelings in front of a large group of people.

So Antonio Damasio, he pointed out in this conversation that to have feelings is by definition to be vulnerable.  Why?  Well, our feelings stir us toward action.  Feelings tell us what we should expend energy and resources in seeking.  Hunger, thirst, the need for social bonding, sex - all of these are expressions of our fundamental vulnerabilities, limitations, and ultimately, mortality.  If we don’t meet our needs, we don’t survive.  Our feelings are our body’s way of communicating unmet needs.

To have experience moving through the world, to engage in life - all of that is evolutionarily motivated by what we lack.  Feelings push us out into the world to seek what we don’t have.  And so if you reveal your feelings, you reveal your limitations.

To participate in life, you have to be limited and vulnerable.  You have to be mortal.

This is where it gets trippy.  The flip side of that coin is that if you don’t have any vulnerabilities, then you don’t have any motivation to do anything.

I’m going to repeat that in a slightly different way:  If you don’t have any vulnerabilities, then you don’t have any feelings.  Feelings are our motivation in life.

Feelings tell us what to do because they are trying to help us compensate for our limits and vulnerabilities.

If you don’t need anything, then you don’t seek anything.  To be omnipotent - all-powerful - would be to sit in stasis.  To be perfectly satisfied would be to never move or change or grow.

I’m a dude, so I can say from a fair amount of dude experience, that men, we tend to wall off emotionally because we don’t want to show weakness.  We know inherently that our feelings can reveal our limits and vulnerabilities.

But this ends up being its own weakness because it cuts us off socially and we are social animals.  Humans have a deep need for social interaction.  And feelings are involved in that social interaction.  The need for things like love and acceptance - lotta feelings in that territory.

What I like about stand-up is that if you can express your vulnerability appropriately, people love it because sharing your feelings gives them permission to share their own feelings.

Everyone wants to express themselves, but we are all terrified of inappropriately expressing our vulnerability and being socially punished for it in various ways.  No one wants to be rejected for expressing themselves.

There’s also always the risk of being misinterpreted.

Jimmy Carr, a very prominent British comedian known for his darker humor, does a lot of tight one-liner style jokes - I was listening to an interview he did and he was talking about how as a comic you need to know who you are authentically AND then you need to know how the rest of the world perceives you.

There’s a gap there.

We’re trying to express ourselves authentically.  But everything we are thinking about is also being filtered out through us as limited, embodied animals.  We look a certain way.  We sound a certain way.  That’s also part of our vulnerability.

So we’re trying to express our authentic feelings through these limited human bodies of ours…as if this wasn’t already challenging enough.

You have to understand what people’s baseline perception of you is when you walk out on stage.  That’s why so many comics start with self-deprecating jokes about their appearance.

You have to address how you look and sound superficially before people will warm up to you and let you talk about things that are more than skin deep.

The goal is to not let peoples’ perceptions of you dictate who you are.  The goal is to embrace your limitations, but then move beyond them.  Everyone has more to express than what’s on the surface.  Our minds are constantly reaching with our imagination beyond our limited bodies.

Consciousness, whatever that is - none of us have quite figured out what is going on with that neurologically - but consciousness allows us to converse with each other and share experiences in unprecedented ways.  That’s a terrible gift to waste by making superficial judgments that cause people to clam up and shut down.

I just mentioned consciousness, so I’m going to appropriately quote at length from Pete Holmes’ book Comedy Sex God now.

Pete Holmes, another fun comedian.  Certified silly billy of a man.  His own journey to authenticity is well documented on his podcast You Made It Weird.  Also with his HBO show Crashing.

Great title for a book because it sounds like he is calling himself a Comedy Sex God when you first read the title.  But the title is actually Comedy, comma, Sex, comma, God.  So those are three separate subjects he tackles in the book, not one unified descriptor of how he sees himself.

Anyway, in Comedy Sex God Pete Holmes is talking about this spiritual mentor of his, Ram Dass, he’s a dude who used to be a psychology professor at Harvard along with Timothy Leary - the fella Richard Nixon thought was trying to ruin America’s youth with drugs - anyway, Ram Dass tripped on some LSD and then became an Eastern spiritual leader - somethin’ like that…but this is Pete in his book - trust me, this is related to what I’ve been talking about in terms of being authentic on stage, personality, acting, embodied consciousness…

This packaging we find ourselves in—our bodies—it’s just a uniform.  You’re not a Jew—you are Awareness in Jewish packaging. I’m not a tall, soft, Lithuanian, I’m Awareness in tall, soft, Lithuanian packaging.

Ram Dass expanded my what-is-this? To include a very big who-is-this?  I never really understood the significance of this question before him.  My whole life, when people would say “The most important question you can ask is ‘Who am I?’”  I always took the question as an invitation to excavate your personality.  Don’t leave anything behind!  Find out if you like sushi!  Or hiking!  Or bubble tea ice cream!  Through all of my twenties and early thirties, if someone had commanded me to “know thyself,” I would’ve replied, “I do!  I am Pete.  I am a soft, right-handed comedian from Lexington, Massachusetts, who likes peanut butter, the first two Christopher Nolan Batman movies, and despite social pressures, doesn’t really care for the Beatles.  I’m sorry.  It just sounds like kids’ music to me.”  That’s how I thought you answered the biggest question of life—just really digging in and laying out your preferences and your dislikes for all to see.  As if after you did that, you’d look back on your life as an old man, satisfied, and say, “Everyone knew how I took my coffee.”

But I was learning that perhaps the better way to ask this question would be, “Who are you, really?”  What is consciousness?

...In other words, what is looking out your eyes right now?  That’s Awareness.  And when all the great spiritual teachers say you have to die to your little self and awaken to your big Self, that’s what they mean.  In fact, that’s how I would summarize all of spirituality: you are not your thoughts, you are not your personality, you are the elemental, pure, eternal consciousness residing behind those thoughts.  Lay down your ego, stop collecting meaningless shit, wake up, and rest in that Awareness.  It’s who you really are.

Now, I think Pete is onto something, but I also think we can’t spend all of our time tripping on mushrooms.  He’s onto something in that by suppressing your own ego - by not being entirely ruled by your own embodied desires - the feelings inside you that say I want this, I need this - you can expand your perspective to include the wider world.  There’s other consciousnesses out there.

If you aren’t inwardly focused on everything your feelings are telling you to do, you might be able to get more in touch with the thoughts and feelings of others around you.  Your consciousness can interact with other people’s consciousness.  You can get this sense that we, as conscious beings, as awareness in general - that we are connected in a different and special way compared to other life out in nature.

If you can get over your own vulnerabilities - the things your ego is trying to protect - you might be able to reach deeper connections with other people.  You can’t do this forever.  You still have to eat and drink and work and survive as an individual in the world.  Human beings didn’t evolve the capacity to successfully meditate our way into a perpetually self-sustaining global shared consciousness.  We still have shit to do to make our way in the world.

However, we might be able to have transcendent moments together here and there.  I see art, and therefore stand-up comedy, as one such opportunity.

The stage is a space to try to dissolve your ego.  Drop your desires.  Drop your fears.  Drop your defenses.  You can plant your feet on some different ground other than the ego.  The stage is about dissolving boundaries and connecting with everyone else.  It’s not about you.  You have to be you, the authentic you.  But you want to reach to see the world through different eyes.

This is where it gets a little fruity again.  Childlike, innocent eyes.  Curious, ignorant eyes.  The eyes of the audience.  Loving eyes.  Grateful eyes.  The eyes of Awareness.

Or, if you find all of this to be too tooty fruity and it sounds like a bunch a’ BS, you could always walk out on stage and say Bernie Mac style “I ain’t scared a’ you mutha fuckas!” *shrug*

Emotional vulnerability in stand-up is frightening.  It is scary to put some portion of you out in the world to be judged and criticized and ripped apart for not conforming with how other people think you should be.

Who the hell are you to stand underneath a spotlight and amplify your feelings with a microphone?

But the thing is: you don’t have to be perfect up there.  You just have to be human.  And humans are goofy, messed up, troubled, wildly imperfect freaks.

It’s a much lower bar to clear than you might think.  Perfection isn’t interesting.  Remember: something that is all-powerful and all-knowing doesn’t have any emotions - it doesn’t need feelings because it doesn’t need anything.  Emotionally honest human messes are more interesting.  That’s what people can relate to.  That’s what makes sense to people living in the real world.

Authentic stand-up isn’t a glossed-over Hollywood production.  You’re not an actor.  It’s a different art form.  Don’t do an act.  Be yourself on stage.

If you do that - if you share your vulnerabilities, you’ll find that other people have similar vulnerabilities.  We’re all mortal.  We’ve all been wounded.  Human consciousness, as big and beautiful and extraordinary as it is, still isn’t infinite.  It’s still fragile.  That’s scary.  But we can laugh about it together.  An’ I think that’s still pretty cool.